
Glass. 
Book. 






Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 



A PAPER 



READ BEFORE THE 



New York Historical Society 



Tuesday, December 4, 1888, 



HON. EDWARD S. ISHAM. 




NEW YORK: 
PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY. 

i: 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 



A PAPER 



READ BEFORE THE 






New York Historical Society 



Tuesday, December 4, 1888, 



HON. EDWARD S/lSHAM, 




NEW YORK: 

PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY. 

1889. 



C^ 



)^ 



~y >o"3o 



At a stated meeting of the New York Historical Society, held in its 
Hall, on Tuesday Evening, December 4, 1888 : 

The Hon. Edward S. Isham, of Chicago, read the paper of the 
evening entitled ^^ Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest.'''' 

On its conclusion the Librarian submitted the following resolution, 
which was adopted unanimously : 

Resolved, That the thanks of the Society be, and hereby are, 
presented to the Hon. Edward S. Isham, for his interesting and 
valuable paper, read this evening, and that a copy be requested for 
publication. 

Extract from the Minutes, 

Andrew Warner, 

Recording Secretary. 



I 



M 






^ 



K?m 



Officers of the Society, 1889, 



PRESIDENT, 

JOHN ALSOP KING. 

FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT, 

JOHN A. WEEKES. 

SECOND VICE-PRESIDENT, 

JOHN S. KENNEDY. 

FOREIGN CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

JOHN BIGELOW. 

DOMESTIC CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

EDWARD F. DE LANCEY 

RECORDING SECRETARY, 

ANDREW WARNER. 

TREASURER, 

ROBERT SCHELL. 

LIBRARIAN, 

CHARLES ISHAM. 




At a stated meeting of the New York Historical Society, held in its 
Hall, on Tuesday Evening, December 4, 1888 : 

The Hon. Edward S. Isham, of Chicago, read the paper of the 
evening entitled "Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest.'''' 

On its conclusion the Librarian submitted the following resolution, 
which was adopted unanimously : 

Resolved, That the thanks of the Society be, and hereby are, 
presented to the Hon. Edward S. Isham, for his interesting and 
valuable paper, read this evening, and that a copy be requested for 
publication. 

Extract from the Minutes, , 

Andrew Warner, 

Recording Secretary. 



I 



M 






a. 






Officers of the Society, 1889, 



PRESIDENT, 

JOHN ALSOP KING. 

FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT, 

JOHN A. WEEKES. 

SECOND VICE-PRESIDENT, 

JOHN S. KENNEDY. 

FOREIGN CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

JOHN BIGELOW. 

DOMESTIC CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

EDWARD F. DE LANCE Y 

RECORDING SECRETARY, 

ANDREW WARNER, 

TREASURER, 

ROBERT SCHELL. 

LIBRARIAN, 

CHARLES ISHAM. 



EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. 



FIRST CLASS — FOR ONE YEAR, ENDING 1890. 

EDWARD F. DE LANCEY, WILLARD PARKER, M.D., 

DANIEL PARISH, Jr. 

SECOND CLASS — FOR TWO YEARS, ENDING 189I. 

BENJAMIN H. FIELD, FREDERIC GALLATIN, 

CHARLES H. RUSSELL, Jr. 

THIRD CLASS FOR THREE YEARS, ENDING 1 892. 

JOHN S. KENNEDY, GEORGE W. VANDERBILT, 

GEORGE H. MOORE, LL.D. 

FOURTH CLASS — FOR FOUR YEARS, ENDING 1 893. 

JOHN A. WEEKES, FREDERICK STURGES, 

JOHN W. C. LEVERIDGE. 

JOHN A. WEEKES, Chairman, 
DANIEL PARISH, Jr., Secretary. 

[The President, Recording Secretary, Treasurer, and Librarian 
are members, ex-officio, of the Executive Committee.] 



COMMITTEE ON THE FINE ARTS. 

DANIEL HUNTINGTON, JACOB B. MOORE, 

ANDREW WARNER, HENRY C. STURGES, 

JOHN A. WEEKES, GEORGE W. VANDERBILT. 

DANIEL HUNTINGTON, Chairman, 
ANDREW WARNER, Secretary. 

[The President, Librarian, and Chairman of the Executive Com- 
mittee are members, ex-officio, of the Committee on the Fine Arts.] 



FRONTENAC AND MILES STANDISH IN 
THE NORTHWEST. 



One may well seem challenged for his vindication who 
presumes to revive in this place discussion of the subject now 
suggested. But any one whose thought is engaged by that 
region which as a historical unit peculiarly holds the inherit- 
ance of the early New England colonization, will gladly find 
there also a revelation of the movement that, perhaps, links 
the development of the past with the remote future. 

The colonial histories have been said to be important only 
as leading up to the war of the revolution, and to the estab- 
lishment, by the federal union, of independence and a dis- 
tinguished new member of the family of nations. It has been 
said that until then they " do not assume the importance and 
value of the history of a nation," finding their ultimate service 
in the accomplishment of that result. But it has come to be 
seen that there is a universal history, a line of progressive 
movement connecting all historical movements together. The 
earliest records open with a populous earth, with civil govern- 
ment in operation, and culture and civilization already in course 
of development. Their beginning is lost, but through ages 
inconceivably long there has been produced an increasing 
heritage of principles of universal value both in civil culture 
and the conditions of its security and advancement. To this 
priceless and lengthening chain successive historical move- 
ments bring unconsciously their contribution, and in relation 
to it all peoples become involuntarily one progressive com- 
munity. One fastens eagerly upon the links of that chain 
wherever their gleam can be caught ; but we are so much 
inclined to please ourselves with the radiance of some attain- 



6 Fronte7iac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

ments of our times, with the apparent giving way of some 
old barriers of thought, and with an obvious amelioration of 
the conditions of modern life, that we perhaps mistake a little 
dawn for the broad day, and fail to observe how close behind 
us, after all, and even around us, are still the gloom and the 
shadows of the primal forest that we think we have emerged 
from, and through which has penetrated that painful and un- 
measurable way to the opening of which all historic races 
have brought their aid. It may be readily understood that 
no personal memoirs are intended of the renowned captain 
of the Pilgrims or of the illustrious governor of New France ; 
but they signally typify two great movements, contemporary 
and almost equally distinguished, which, though very re- 
mote in origin, so converged as to expend their force in a 
singular degree upon the Northwest, and by their contrasted 
character and inherent tendencies aid us to get our own bear- 
ings and bring us directly upon vital questions of our own 
time. 

One of these movements, which was distinctly ecclesiasti- 
cal and seigniorial, entered upon our continent through the 
avenue of the great St. Lawrence River and the Lakes. The 
qualities of poverty and discipline, of self-sacrifice and mar- 
tyrdom, were glorified at Pampeluna in the reveries of Loyola, 
and found their exponent in that unique Society of Jesus, 
which has been unequalled in the world in the efficient devo- 
tion of its members to their faith, and above all things to 
their Order. A prodigious opulence and power of the Order 
itself, with an unparalleled arrogance of dominion arose upon 
poverty and personal humility in the lower ranks, through 
matchless enterprise and skill of administration. Its priests 
were sent into every accessible corner of the world. No 
voyage of discovery, no tale of any wandering adventurer 
indicated the existence of an unvisited people, but men went 
instantly upon the work of exploration and conversion ; and 
no courage could surpass that of men whose exaltation of 
spirit rose with the appearance of peril and the chance of 
suffering and death in remote recesses of savage regions and 
savage society. 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 7 

The civil society of France was rooted in the severest 
feudalism of Northern Europe. Feudalism throughout all its 
gradations was an organization of servitude, mitigated in the 
upper ranks by arbitrary privileges and prerogatives, which 
diminished as the rank descended, so that the burden of 
servitude accumulated as it fell from grade to grade, and 
rested with hopeless and crushing oppression upon the great 
mass of the people at the bottom. We behold it in a retro- 
spect giving origin to picturesque manners- and architecture, 
and associated with institutions of piety and charity ; and the 
development of chivalry, the glory of the Crusades, the hero- 
ism of famed men, and the lustre of great events, unite to be- 
guile our thought from the fact that all that exists of freedom 
and of popular security in modern states has been won in 
spite of feudalism, and has been rescued from the doom of 
slavery to which that institution consigned society. There 
was no room within it for any principle of civil liberty. The 
first condition of liberty was what is now called Nihilism. 
Every step gained was an annihilation /r<9 tanto of some feu- 
dal element. The doctrines which live in our Declaration of 
Independence and in the Constitution of the United States 
were also the first flowers that blossomed at the foot of the 
French guillotine. In the times of Francis I. and Henry IV. 
the privilege and prerogative of the twelve peers who stood 
around the throne of Hugh Capet were shared among two 
hundred grand seigniors Avho had succeeded them. These 
represented the landed estates, the great titles, the ostentation 
and arrogance and splendor of living, and the social and po- 
litical power which supported the monarchy. They were the 
class whose power was broken by Richelieu to build the ab- 
solutism of Louis XIV. Outlying these was a large body of 
the nobility, and a greater multitude of gentlemen, noble by 
caste but untitled, touchy and proud, penniless but ambi- 
tious, hunting for pocket-money and for fortune, full of the 
spirit of adventure, infinitely expert with their rapiers, and 
ready to sell them to the service of any superior nobleman 
who would employ and pay for them. Their gentility of 
birth excluded them by law from ordinary occupations of 



8 Frofitenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

trade and commerce, but they hovered about the splendors 
of the Louvre, and the later ones of Versailles, and formed 
the retinues of the great nobles. Below these lay the trading 
and artisan people of the cities and large towns, and the 
hopeless subjection of the country peasantry. This was, how- 
ever, that age that was distinguished by the awakening of the 
intellect of Europe. Scholarship and science had revived 
with printing. Men began to think. Language was improved 
by Rabelais and Montaigne. Luther, and the deeper heresy 
of Calvin, set thought free upon ecclesiasticism. Something 
of art and refinement came in from Italy, and the Italian sur- 
vival of Roman municipal citizenship had brought about the 
enfranchisement of the communes. Out of these conditions 
came the civil founders of New France. 

On the surface of the round globe, in the summer of i534j 
perhaps no movement of equal portent was less conspicuous 
than the slow creeping of the white sails of Jacques Cartier's 
little vessels up the stream of that great flood, the St. Law- 
rence River. But one ship of adventurers followed another, 
and Champlain came, and the Jesuits, and the first colony in 
Canada was founded on the great rock of Quebec in 1608, 
and more substantially in 1620. In that year the Mayflower 
landed her company, and in the same year Frontenac was 
born. Year by year colonists came from France ; shiploads 
of peasants, traders, seamen from St. Malo and other seaport 
towns, a few ruined noblemen, adventurers of every class, 
penniless gentlemen, officers and soldiers, women in companies, 
and always Jesuits and a few Franciscan priests, to whom it 
was appalling that the heathen Indians should perish when a 
few drops of water would bring them to the state of grace of 
the baptized but unsanctified hunters of fortune who repre- 
sented the civil state of France in the New World. A fringe 
of timorous settlements developed for two or three hundred 
miles along the borders of the narrowing river. Behind the 
settlements lay a wilderness of distrustful savages. It was 
the tentative approach, the stealthy creeping into the bosom 
of a new world of a form of society that had worn out the 
conditions of life and subsistence in Europe. It was the fas- 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 9 

tening of an antique parasite upon a new body pulsating in 
all the infinite springs and currents that feed the requirements 
of social and political development. The colony gained vigor 
and courage as it drew into the presence of that magnificent 
citadel of nature whereon the city of Quebec was founded, 
and which impressed the earliest explorers as a spot appointed 
by fate to be the capital of an empire. It is upon this cold, 
gray rock, this anticipation of imperial eminence, that we first 
behold, in 1672, the unique and feudal figure of Louis, Comte 
de Frontenac, the Governor of Canada, and Lieutenant-Gen- 
eral of Louis XIV. of France. 

The background against which this figure is projected is 
the Europe of Anne of Austria and Mazarin ; of the regicides 
and of Cromwell ; of Louis XIV. and the Prince of Orange ; 
of the Venetian wars with the Turks ; of Turenne, Conde, 
Marlborough, and Gustavus Adolphus. On it are taking 
place historic wars, and battles great in the politics of Europe. 
The Czar Peter appears in his shop at Zaandam ; the Turks 
of Kara Mustapha, with their horse-tail standards, are before 
Vienna, and John Sobieski is on the heights of the Kalen- 
berg ; the royal charters and grants of American territory are 
issued, and the great movements of colonization are going on. 
Frontenac himself belonged rather high in the ranks of the 
nobility, but his fortune was slender and soon wasted. His* 
life was spent brilliantly as a soldier in the camps of the Prince 
of Orange, in command of the regiment of Normandy in Ital- 
ian campaigns, and in the defence of Candia — the Crete of 
Ariadne and King Minos. He was made a colonel at seven- 
teen years of age, and was, it is said, an eminent lieutenant- 
general at twenty-nine, covered with decorations and scars. 
It was was not pleasure, but ambition, that made liim accept 
an exile in a world of savages and adventurers. There, it 
seemed, was to be reproduced, in its beginnings, the same 
social system he left at home. There were to be gained new 
lordships and seigniories and fortunes, with which he might 
return to the court of Versailles. 

In France the nobles, who with increasing numbers but 
diminishing powers had meddled with the administration of 



10 Front enac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

every king from Capet to Louis XII,, saw their last vestige of 
share in the government disappear on the scaffolds of Riche- 
lieu. But their prerogatives that Richelieu destroyed were 
those that might impede the king. Their rights and preroga- 
tives as against the social grades below them were not the 
objects of his jealousy. When, therefore, great seigniories 
were carved out and granted in Canada, and established 
under the code of French laws known as the "Customs of 
Paris," the political and social conditions of feudal France 
were also established, and were fastened upon the reluctant 
borders of the great river, and the forest freedom of inde- 
pendent tribes. In the midst and at the head of such a sys- 
tem stood Frontenac at Quebec. He was the fitting repre- 
sentative of Louis XIV. He was the perfect impersonation 
of his imperial spirit and policy, and of the political system 
of his time. Our purpose here is not with the general 
history of Canada, nor with the personal history of Fronte- 
nac, but with the social and political movement of which he 
was the representative. Apart from the easy acquisition of 
landed estates, and the hopes that lay in industry and tillage, 
a special allure enticed the traders and emigrants into the 
northern wilderness. All the opulence of this part of the 
world lay on the backs of the little animals that roamed the 
forests or lived on the banks of the numerous and abundant 
streams. What diamonds were to Golconda, pearls to Cape 
Comorin, gold mines to Mexico and Peru, wools to the 
vale of Cashmere, spices and perfumes to Arabia, that were 
furs to the vast region lying north of the St. Lawrence and the 
Lakes. A magnificent element of imperial power lay in the 
facility which the position of Canada gave for the monopoly 
of all this trade, which was then the coveted and dispropor- 
tionate element in the commerce of the world. The most 
zealous restrictions and regulations to uphold the monopoly 
challenged the ingenuity of everyone to evade and defeat 
them. Settlers were forbidden to trade with the Indians, 
except as they sold their furs at a fixed price. They 
were forbidden to leave the settled country ; and trade in 
the wilderness was forbidden. Noblemen forfeited their 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 1 1 

rank by trade, and the controlling Jesuits were under the 
common prohibition. But everyone, governor and intend- 
ant, priests and soldiers, gentlemen and all, every officer ot 
the government, while watching like a weasel every other 
officer, all got as deep as they could with hope of conceal- 
ment into this illicit and contraband trade. Down the St. 
Lawrence and down the stream of the Ottawa the Indian 
canoes came paddling every year in fleets, with their freight 
of peltry. A cunning strife for the advantage of meet- 
ing them earliest on their way, or . of meeting the wander- 
ing bands in the woods, and of trading there for their furs 
equally forestalled the law and the commercial sagacity that 
ought to have waited for the competition of a wider market. 
The allurements of traffic and zeal for the conversion of sav- 
ages attracted the spirited adventurers and missionaries far- 
ther and farther up the river-courses and along the lakes into 
the recesses of the unexplored world, until they came upon 
the streams that pour into the valley of the Mississippi. Fol- 
lowing up the stream of the Ottawa and Lake Nipissing, they 
came to the upper waters of Lake Huron and to the Sault 
St. Marie, so that Lake Erie was the last of the lakes discov- 
ered, and the country lying south of it the last explored by 
the French. At certain points which were known to be proli- 
fic fishing-grounds, and at others where game abounded, the 
Indians were accustomed to gather in great numbers and for 
long sojourns. To these places came the brave missionaries 
and established their missions. Such places were the mis- 
sions of St. Esprit, of the Sault Ste. Marie, of St. Ignace, of 
Michilimacinac, and the head of Green Bay, where Father 
Allouez founded the mission of St. Francis Xavier. In the 
depths of the forest many of these men, pure-spirited and 
devoted, sought and found the seal of their consecration in 
fire and torture. The senses and the intellect stand appalled 
by the doom to which Pere Brebeuf was consigned and 
abandoned. The idea of moral government was derided by 
the victory of fiends, which lighted the remote recesses of 
that forest theatre, while his spirit rose exultant because the 
prayer of his youth in distant France, and of all his life, was 



12 Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Noi'thwest. 

answered, that God would accord him for reward the honor 
of martyrdom in the wilderness. Standing before him, 
young Lallement, lashed from head to foot in strips of bark 
and pitch, ready for the match, revived the memory of the 
living torches with which Nero lighted the Vatican gardens, 
that are now within the crab-like arms of St. Peter's. Under 
the forest the dark earth was dumb, and the stars above were 
silent, and through the mist of horror and of distance he 
must have seen the door of his humble home by the Seijie, 
while faith struggled to meet its silent reproach of useless 
abandonment. But wherever these men went they carried 
the empire of the king and the supremacy of the Church, 
When they erected by the shore, or carved on the bark of 
trees the arms of France, they set above them the cross of 
the ecclesiastical dominion. 

But Frontenac was the representative of his feudal master 
in the citadel of Quebec, and of the arms of his civil and po- 
litical power. To extend the domain of France, to vindicate 
in the new world the pre-eminence of his king, to construct 
and cement the foundations of a grand empire, was the splen- 
did dream of Frontenac's ambition. He thought, as the ec- 
clesiastics also did, that the emigrant colonists and the In- 
dians could be amalgamated and made the basic population 
of a civilized and industrial state. He also hoped to build 
up his own ruined fortunes and confirm them with wealth 
and distinction. To his mind here was a vast population 
and a vaster territory ready to be carved into seigniories ; 
and to the eyes of the ecclesiastics there was a corresponding 
field for ecclesiastical ambition. An alliance of sympathy 
between him and La Salle, and a common interest in the il- 
licit traffic of the time, gave him the reinforcement of views 
and ambition as wide and daring as his own. A military 
fortress at the very head of the St. Lawrence would mani- 
festly extend and confirm the dominion of the king, and with 
equal certainty anticipate the fur trade in the secret interest 
of Frontenac and La Salle. By rapid action the governor 
built the formidable fort named Frontenac, where the city 
of Kingston stands. Already a large seigniory had been 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 1 3 

given to La Salle, just above Montreal, at La Chine. Sub- 
sequently Fort Frontenac, with a wide surrounding territory, 
was also given to him as a seigniory. A little later, another 
great feudal seigniory, that marked the extension of French 
empire, was carved out and granted to La Salle, in the heart 
of Illinois, in the very heart of the continent, near the con- 
fluence of the greatest rivers, and at a point that seemed to 
dominate the springs and the courses of political and com- 
mercial supremacy. 

The Northwest lies where the great valleys of the St. 
Lawrence and the Lakes, and the Mississippi, ascending, meet 
and merge into each other ; and bearing a similar relation to 
both, it geographically dominates that tremendous sweep 
from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. La Salle planted 
his Fort St. Louis of the Illinois on the summit of Starved 
Rock, to make it the centre of his colony in the midst of this 
region, central and commanding for all the vast extent of 
new French empire. A continuous French occupation of 
Illinois, since his settlement in 1679, marks La Salle as its 
founder. The old French town, Kaskaskia, was its capital in 
17 12, as Fort Chartres, a formidable fortress, was afterward. 
Lying partly at the head of the Lakes and the St. Lawrence, 
and partly at the head of the Mississippi, which receives the 
waters of thirty-five thousand miles of navigable affluents, 
walled in from the Atlantic slope by the Apallachian Moun- 
tains, a superior sentiment of political and social community 
of the Northwest with these great openings to the outer world 
is inevitable. The strength of this natural tendency is rarely 
perhaps appreciated, nor the extent to which it is now neu- 
tralized, and even overcome, by the effect of the great rail- 
ways which cross the mountain barriers and run directly to 
the coast, particularly by that great artificial highway which 
comes to the bay of New York through the wonderful gate- 
way of the Mohawk, where the beetling precipices barely 
make room for the passage of the railways, the telegraph, 
the canal, the highway, and the river, and that other one 
which comes to the same point by surmounting the Alle- 
ghenies in Pennsylvania. To thus rival and overcome the 



14 Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

influence of such vast natural waterways as those of the Lakes 
and the Mississippi, and consolidate the sentiment of a com- 
mon country as against Alpine divisions, is an impressive 
evidence of the social and political force exerted by these ar- 
tificial avenues of commerce. 

It was the imperial political influence and power inherent 
in this position which was comprehended by Frontenac and 
La Salle. La Salle went up the St. Lawrence exploring a 
way to China. It is amusing at this day to find in the little 
Canadian town of La Chine, by the rapids, the memento of 
his geographical hallucination. Gradually but effectively the 
vision of Asia and of the opulence that lay in oriental com- 
merce faded from the view of the explorers, and one of Eu- 
ropean dominion and feudal seigniories in the heart of the 
American continent shone in its place. 

The emigrant founders of this new empire were not seek- 
ing escape from any obnoxious principles of government, or 
institutions of society of the country they came from. They 
had no purpose to improve or to change the church or the 
state, or to improve the general condition of the more bur- 
dened classes. On the other hand, there was no purpose 
specifically to extend any particular system of society. The 
law of France, i.e., its political system, went to its colony as 
of course. But every man hoped under the same social 
framework to improve his own relative position in the form. 
From the noble to the peasant no one thought of improving 
the form of the state ; but every one hoped for a better rela- 
tive position in it. The peasant hoped to be a landed pro- 
prietor under conditions of comfort. The bourgeois trader, 
and the untitled gentleman who literally found no room for 
himself in France, hoped for titles and distinction in the new 
empire. They made no objection to seigniories, and, on the 
contrary, they hoped to become seigniors. The system, 
however, contemplated a vast underlying mass of subject 
people, upon whom should devolve the burdens of all servi- 
tude, and upon whose palpitating bodies the heels of all su- 
perior classes should, as in France, trample without resist- 
ance ; and to this fortunate field were relegated, in the mind 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 1 5 

of the peasant emigrant, the whole vast Indian population, to 
be turned toward industry and Christianized ; and in the 
minds of the nobles and the priests and the gentlemen, the 
Indians and the peasant emigrants as well. 

Now it would be incorrect to say that these people under- 
took and expected to transplant to the new world the im- 
perial splendors of the empire of Louis XIV., and to repro- 
duce there the glories of Versailles and the lordly life of the 
French nobility in the provinces. It is probable that through 
the mist of many intervening years their imagination may 
have seen the castellated forms of towers that served to illus- 
trate the distinction of their posterity, and the ecclesiastical 
pinnacles that betokened the triumphs of their faith ; but 
they knew that for themselves their homes were to be made 
in the midst of a wilderness which they must redeem ; among 
savages whom they must reclaim or destroy. They knew 
their lives were doomed to exile, to peril unceasing, to toil 
without respite. Whatever might He in the future, there was 
for them nothing of the splendors of French government or 
society. Meanwhile the tenant broke up the forest on the 
land held of his seignior, and watched from his cabin for the 
stealthy attack of savages ; and the seignior, in his log cha- 
teau, held his courts and contentedly received his feudal hom- 
age and his feudal rental of farthings and poultry. But 
these were the poor and severe beginnings, as he felt assured, 
of an empire that might some day be splendid, wherein even 
the beginnings of rank were of value ; and in the petty court 
at Montreal or Quebec the beggarly officers and nobles and 
gentry and traders, in decorations and costumes that might 
often forbid them to ridicule the gaudy bedeckings of the for- 
f est chiefs at a council fire, aped the manners and studied the 
distinctions that obtained in France. 

So it is true that there was nothing noble or elevated in 
the movement itself, nor ennobling or dignifying in the mo- 
tives or purpose of its participants. It was the most com- 
monplace form of colonization, a mere swarming from an oc- 
cupied to an empty field — from a field wherein by their ut- 
most endeavor most men could barely hold their own in the 



1 6 Front enac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

bitter and weary competition for livelihood, to one where the 
extreme of toil, hardship, and peril promised an ultimate se- 
curity, competence, and independence. It is the nature oi 
such movements, because they involve no element of revolt, 
to carry with them the law and social usage of the parent 
country. The movement is not founded in any new concep- 
tion or scheme of government or law, but only in the per- 
sonal interest of each participant, and so the old conditions 
go with the emigrant as of course, borne like the moraines on 
the backs of glaciers. It was so with Phoenician and Greek 
colonies, and Dorian and Corinthian colonies were Dorian 
and Corinthian themselves to the end. Such colonies there- 
fore are duplex in character. From the stand-point of the 
empire or sovereignty which sends them out, they are the 
outposts of the empire, the propngnacula imperii of Cicero, a 
medium of extension of language and administration, and of 
imperial expansion. The movement is susceptible of becom- 
ing one of momentous historical importance and consequence. 
But looked at from the stand-point of the colonist, it is digni- 
fied by no moral or political purpose. It is wholly contained 
within the limits of the personal self-seeking of the individual 
emigrant. 

It is this social and political freight, which is thus borne 
without conscious purpose by currents of immigration, which 
gives historical importance to the French establishment in 
Canada, and its movements into the Northwest. The emi- 
grants exhibited the hardihood and endurance common to all 
who are pioneers in a new country. The missionaries illus- 
trated that zeal for their cause and that faith in their religion 
which is everywhere found among the martyrs to religious 
belief and the champions of an ecclesiastical system. These, 
admirable as they are, are the commonplaces of history after 
all, like the courage and the grand exploits of soldiers ; but 
the chance which existed that the feudal conditions of con- 
tinental Europe might be actually established on this con- 
tinent, and on the very banks of the Illinois, is a matter that 
we may well pause and make the subject of reflection. 

A seigniory in the time of Frontenac represented the 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 1 7 

aggregate abuse of all the privilege and prerogative ac- 
quired by the chiefs since the Prankish conquest. With the 
changes of society every privilege had been preserved and 
every public burden evaded. The nobles held ail the wealth 
of the country, but the burden of taxes was rolled off upon 
the toiling populations who worked the lands and made the 
highways, and had nothing left but broken spirits when their 
work was done. The seignior lived as a prince among the 
people who had once been serfs. He had his precedence, 
and his ancestral tombs in the church ; he held his courts of 
high and low jurisdiction, appointed petty officers within his 
realm, and enforced his laws by his prison and often by his 
gibbet. To him went forfeited and confiscated property, all 
property found, and waifs and wrecks ; and a share of every- 
thing produced by the labor of his people, and fines on every 
change of title. Tolls and contributions and monopolies 
were a torment and an oppression. He established his scales, 
his markets, and his mill, his oven, Avine-press, and slaughter- 
house, and to these all must come with their tolls. Such 
were the seigniories granted and established in New France. 
Frontenac was gravely rebuked in 1672 by Colbert for the 
first step toward a recognition of the estates and the institu- 
tion of a municipal government for Quebec. " You are al- 
ways," he said, " to follow, in the government of Canada, 
the forms in use here ; and since our kings have long re- 
garded it as good for their service not to convoke the states 
of the kingdom, in order, perhaps, to abolish insensibly this 
ancient usage, you on your part should very rarely, or to 
speak more correctly, never give a corporate form to the 
inhabitants of Canada. You should even, as the colony 
strengthens, suppress gradually the office of the syndic who 
presents petitions in the name of the inhabitants; for it is* 
well that each should speak for himself and none for all.'" 
A writer upon the " Constitutional History of Canada" illus- 
trates the social situation in the following statement : 

" At the time of the Conquest [1763], the seigniors and 
the peasants constituted two important factors in the problem 

' Parkman's Frontenac, p. 20. 
2 



1 8 Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

of a new government. The seigniors were entitled, accord- 
ing to the code of feudalism, to erect courts and to preside 
in them as judges. They could administer what was known 
as 'haute, ntoyenne et basse justice.' They could take cogni- 
zance of all crimes committed within their jurisdiction, except 
murder and treason. If they did not, in the French period, 
exercise their tyrannous rights over the lives, limbs, and liber- 
ties of their vassals, it was because they were too poor to or- 
ganize the machinery of seigniorial courts, build dungeons, 
and retain jailers and executioners. That it was this power 
to crush, which was wanting to the seigniors, and not the 
spirit, may be seen in their complaint of the hardship of not 
being permitted, under British rule, to exercise their feudal 
jurisdiction. . . . The feeling of the peasants toward 
their seigniors was fear, not affection. This experience, 
however, is as wide as the circuit of Europe, and as old as 
feudalism. In the injuries done him by his seignior the 
Canadian peasant could only suffer ; redress he had none. 
The people who were not ' noble,' and who were more than 
nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand, were well 
pleased that the battering-ram of the Common Law had 
broken down the fortress of unjust privilege, which in the 
period of French domination had walled in the noble from 
the consequences of his acts." ' 

Such, then, was an American seigniory in point of its legal 
establishment. The torture of the rack was of common oc- 
currence in the administration of criminal law in Canada.'' 
It has been found agreeable by writers to depict in pleasing 
pictures the Arcadian simplicity and contented peace of the 
French and Indian colonies in Illinois, led by Pere Grav- 
ier, Marest, and others, to the vicinity of Kaskaskia and Old 
Fort Chartres, with their careless and idle lives in their 
white-washed and vine-clad cottages;^ and literature is be- 
ginning to throw over the indolent security of these people 
that picturesque aspect of peace which is illustrated by the 

' Watson, Constitutional History of Canada, pp. 11-14. 
■^ Watson, Constitutional History of Canada, p. 25, Note. 
■■' Breese, History of Illinois, pp. 195-200, 223-231. 



Front enac and Miles Standish in the Northzvest. 19 

antitheses of fortresses grass-grown, and of birds nesting in 
the very embrasures of the cannon. But this was because 
only that part of the machinery of this political and social 
system was in operation which they controlled and operated 
themselves, and the iron hand of superior power had not yet 
been felt among them when they passed under the sover- 
eignty of England. They had no Anglo-Saxon comprehen- 
sion of political rights, or idea of participation in public 
afifairs ; no Anglo-Saxon capacity to take it when ofifered. 
Upon these subjects they were perfectly indifferent, and ut- 
terly Avithout aspiration or sense of responsibility.' They il- 
lustrated all the characteristics of our Southern African people 
since their enfranchisement. Fortunately it is unnecessary 

1 " In the year 1818 the whole people numbered about forty-five thousand souls. 
Some two thousand of these were the descendants of the old French settlers in 
the villages of Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Prairie du Pont, Cahokia, Peoria, 
and Chicago. These people had fields in common for farming, and farmed, built 
houses, and lived in the style of the peasantry in old France a hundred and fifty 
years ago. They had made no improvements in anything, nor had they adopted 
any of the improvements made by others. They \\^re the descendants of those 
.French people who had first settled the country, more than a hundred and fifty 
years before, under Lasalle, Iberville, and the priests Alvarez, Rasles, Gravier, 
Pinet, Marest, and others, and such as subsequently joined them from New Orleans 
and Canada ; and they now formed all that remained of the once proud empire 
which Louis XIV., king of France, and the regent Duke of Orleans, had intended to 
plant in the Illinois country. The original settlers had many of them intermarried 
with the native Indians, and some of the descendants of these partook of the wild, 
roving disposition of the savage, united to the politeness and courtesy of the 
Frenchman. In the year 1818, and for many years before, the crews of keel-boats 
on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were furnished from the Frenchmen of this 
stock. Many of them spent a great part of their time, in the spring and fall sea- 
sons, in paddling their canoes up and down the rivers and lakes in the river bot- 
toms, on hunting excursions in pursuit of deer, fur, and wild fowl, and generally 
returned home well loaded with skins, fur, and feathers, which were with them the 
great staple of trade. Those who stayed at home contented themselves with cul- 
tivating a few acres of Indian corn, in their common fields, for bread, and provid- 
ing a supply of prairie hay for their cattle and horses. No genuine Frenchman in 
those days ever wore a hat, cap, or coat. The heads of both men and women 
were covered with Madras cotton handkerchiefs, which were tied around, in the fash- 
ion of night-caps. For an upper covering of the body the men wore a blanket gar- 
ment, called a ' capot ' (pronounced cappo), with a cap to it at the back of the 
neck, to be drawn over the head for a protection in cold weather, or in warm. 
weather to be thrown back on the shoulders in the fashion, of. a, ca.pe., Noiwith^ 



20 Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

to explore the outlines of the great dominion that was given 
to the seignior of Fort St. Louis of the IlHnois, for the present 
proprietor, even of Starved Rock itself, will search in vain the 
abstract of his title for the slightest trace of the great seigniory 
of Robert Cavelier de La Salle. 

The other movement came upon our coast at the shallow 
bay of Plymouth. There came into New England then not 
only the Pilgrims, but the constitution of the Mayflower. 

An iceberg drifting in the sea is not more cleanly parted 
from its original than the community in the cabin of the May- 
flower was from the political society it left behind. Conceive 

standing this people had been so long separated by an immense wilderness from 
civilized society, they still retained all the suavity and politeness of their race. 
And it is a remarkable fact that the roughest hunter and boatman among them 
could at any time appear in a ball-room, or other polite and gay assembly, vi-ith 
the carriage and behavior of a well-bred gentleman. The French women were 
remarkable for the sprightliness of their conversation and the grace and elegance of 
their manners. And the whole population lived lives of alternate toil, pleasure, 
innocent amusement, and gayety. 

«' Their horses and cattle,for want of proper care and food for many generations, 
had degenerated in size, but had acquired additional vigor and toughness, so that 
a French pony was a proverb for strength and endurance. These ponies were 
made to draw, sometimes one alone, sometimes two together, one hitched before 
the other, to the plough, or to carts made entirely of wood, the bodies of which 
held about double the contents of the body of a common wheelbarrow. The 
oxen were yoked by the horns instead of the neck, and in this mode were made to 
draw the plough and cart. Nothing like reins were ever used in driving ; the 
whip of the driver, with a handle about two feet, and a lash two yards long, 
stopped or guided the horse as effectually as the strongest reins. 

»< The French houses were mostly built of hewn timber, set upright in the ground, 
or upon plates laid upon a wall, the intervals between the upright pieces being 
filled with stone and mortar. Scarcely any of them were more than one story 
high, with a porch on one or two sides, and sometimes all around, with low roofs 
extending with slopes of different steepness from the comb in the centre to the 
lowest part of the porch. These houses were generally placed in gardens, sur- 
rounded by fruit-trees of apples, pears, cherries, and peaches ; and in the villages 
each enclosure for a house and garden occupied a whole block or square, or the 
greater part of one. Each village had its Catholic church ami priest. The 
church was the great place of gay resort on Sundays and holidays, and the priest 
was the adviser and director and companion of all his flock. The people looked 
up to him with affection and reverence, and he upon them with compassion and 
tenderness."— Ford's History of Illinois, pp. 35-38. 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 21 

as sharply as one can of the cleavage that marked the separa- 
tion and he will hardly exaggerate it. The legal fiction of ex- 
tra-territorial jurisdiction was put in practical abeyance. With- 
in the ship floated a political fragment broken off from the peo- 
ple of England. With no charter or incorporation ; with no 
authority from the English sovereign ; with no grant of ter- 
ritory from any pope or king ; with a ship hired solely to 
convey them across the Atlantic — the little people rode the wa- 
ters a moving and unorganized assembly. Within the shelter 
of Cape Cod they framed a political organization as original 
as if they were the only inhabitants of the earth. A collec- 
tive body of individuals, by virtue of the sovereignty which in- 
hered in them, created themselves a civil body politic for gov-- 
ernment. Here were declared the principles of sovereignty 
in the people, of civil liberty, of justice and equality in laws, 
and the subordination of each person to the " general good." 
There was no reservation of the laws of England. They un- 
derstood that they were erecting a new state upon indepen- 
dent and original foundations, for the action was thought to be 
made necessary by an inclination which developed in certain 
of the number to assert and use the absolute liberty of indi- 
viduals who had passed out from under any civil government 
whatever. But this new state imparted to its lav/ an original 
sanction derived from sovereignty within itself, and not from 
an extension of the sovereignty of England. The act was 
deliberate and can bear no other construction.' By the effect 
of this constitution feudalism, with its tenures, entails, and 
primogeniture, was extinct among this people. Mr. Bancroft 
says it " was the birth of popular constitutional liberty," and 
that " in the cabin of the Mayflower humanity recovered its 
rights."^ It is true; and by one act all the constitutional 
history of the states of Europe, from Pompey the Great to 
John Hampden, fell out, and the free principles of the old 
Roman constitution survived in the constitution of the May- 
flower. 

1 Palfrey, History of New EnglanJ, vol. i., p. 164, note i. Goodwin, The 
Pilgrim Republic, p. 62. 

* History of U. S., vol. i., p. 310. 



22 Frontenac and Miles Standish hi the Northwest. 

This isolation from the associations of the old world, 
which was intended by the Pilgrims, makes them the expo- 
nent of a peculiar organization of society. They left behind 
them something more than three thousand miles of barren and 
pathless sea. They left behind the political system and the 
ecclesiastical system, with their combinations and their com- 
mingled traditions, which were rooted in the general thought 
of the communities they abandoned. They had to disengage 
themselves from this mental complication. They had to make 
a break with the past. They left the old communities to 
work out their results in England by the more or less violent 
processes of social evolution ; but they needed a new planet 
or a fresh wilderness for their own scheme of social polity un- 
entangled with antique traditions that tended against them. 
In this light the great Puritan colonization of 1830 contained 
elements of a different character, and was not of equal dignity 
with that of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. While greater in 
mass and far exceeding in all the elements that constitute so- 
cial and political power ; while the details of its turbulent and 
picturesque history have, because Massachusetts has furnished 
its literature, overshadowed the consistent and uncomplicated 
annals of Plymouth, nevertheless, to a degree that cannot be 
ignored and ought not to be obscured, it had the common- 
place character of ordinary colonizing movements. There 
was not the same sharp-cut cleavage from old-world condi- 
tions. Like all the colonizing movements of the world, ex- 
cept that of Plymouth, it carried upon its back the common- 
place freight of the traditional law and habit of thought, and 
social usage of the parent country. The basic purpose of the 
movement was identical with that of Plymouth — to find liberty 
and a new state in a new world — and the difference between 
Puritan and Non-conformist and Separatist counted for noth- 
ing. The appearance of church loyalty, which expediency 
had maintained, dissolved instantly under the independence 
of the new community and the example and counsel of Plym- 
outh.' A living fire from the altar of Calvin glowed in the 
souls of all alike. These were not ruined and debauched 
' Doyle, Puritan Colonies, vol. i., p. 95. 



Fvontenac and Miles Staitdish in the Northwest. 23 

noblemen, nor penniless "gentlemen," hangers-on of the 
great, and vagabonds by inheritance ; nor hunters of fortune 
or glory, nor the refuse of the seaports or the farms, nor the 
criminals of the state. They belonged to the manliest and 
most intellectually accomplished part of the inhabitants of 
England. They worthily represented the best heart and 
brain and character and scholarship of England, the material 
of the Parliaments of Elizabeth, of Cromwell's army, the as- 
sociates and friends of Milton and Algernon Sidney. Fron- 
tenac called them " genuine old parliamentarians," and " the 
rebels and old republican leaven of Cromwell." ' They in- 
cluded graduates of the great universities of England, and 
among them men like Thomas Hooker and like John Cotton, 
who abandoned the stateliest parish church in England for 
the primitive meeting-house of the Massachusetts colony.'' 
The participants in this movement came of a set purpose. 
They spurned the mines and the fountains of Indian fable. 
They knew history, and they held a philosophy of history by 
which the ultimate goal was not the extension of any form of 
government, nor of any ecclesiastical system, but the establish- 
ment of whatever would best develop the faculties of every 
individual under its influence. The end of history with them 
was the development of man — not of a government nor of a 
church. It is said that " they were animated, like a Greek 
colony, with the desire to reproduce the political life of the 
country they were leaving.' That was Greek, but with defer- 
ence I think it was neither Puritan nor Pilgrim. They in- 
tended to leave England behind them. What of Stuart or of 
Tudor or of bishops and archbishops did Standish and Win- 
slow, or Dudley or Cotton desire to bring to the wilderness ? 
It was the brooding revolution, it was the soul of Cromwell 
that came with them. Avoiding the intermediate processes 
they proposed to make the perfected results of the revolution 
the starting-point' for New England. So much was common 
to them all. But with the Puritan influx of 1630 came also a 
freight of old-time tradition and personal and class ambition 

' Parkman, Frontenac, 283, 295. ^ Palfrey, History of New England, p. 368. 

'Doyle, Puritan Colonies, vol. i., p. loi. 



24 Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

that was pregnant with mischief and fatal to the peace of 
Massachusetts. With the very first movement there was 
borne in an oligarchical spirit that gave the colony no rest. 
It was civil and it was clerical. The leading men came, with 
the idea of establishing rank and class distinction and pre- 
rogative.' There were to be gentlemen and noblemen and 
the commoners and the clergy. It is incontestible that at the 
beginning hostility to democracy governed the purposes of 
the dominant men, civil and clerical. In their interest the 
limitation of the capacity to hold office or to vote in elections 
to the membership of the churches disfranchised the very 
great majority of the people from the outset. In 1676 five- 
sixths of the people remained outside the church and there- 
fore disfranchised.^ It is a marvel how the destruction of the 
hierarchy has resulted in the exaltation of the individual 
priest in his congregation. The men of better descent, 
wealth, and influence determined to establish by law in Mas- 
sachusetts some privileged class. What has been happily 
called the " Brahminism " and the " Brahmin caste " of New 
England stands on a very different basis.' When confronted 
by the antagonism of the popular mass they appealed to the 
arbitrament of the ministers or the elders, and the decision 
never failed to support them. Nothing of this was in the 
little Plymouth state ; but this old-world freight of social 
tradition and habit was borne into and deposited in the midst 
of the colony of Massachusetts Bay. The stream of demo- 
cratic principles, to which the great majority was loyal, and 
which was reinforced by the example and influence of Plym- 
outh, rose round and against this alien mass and finally en- 
gulfed it. From 1629 to 1690 the struggle with it was unre- 
mitted. This foreign element is the source of all the indis- 
criminate reproach which has been heaped upon the Puritans. 
It was like the plunder of Jericho in Joshua's army. There 
could be no prosperity till it was out and the men were dead. 
All colonial New FIngland has had to bear the stigma of prin- 

' Doyle, Pur. Col., vol. i. , pp. 104, 105 ; Johnston, Connecticut, pp. 64, 67. 
' Johnston, Connecticut, p. 66. 
^ Holmes, Elsie Venner, vol. i., p. i ; 20 Brownson's Quar. Rev., 421. 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 25 ; 

ciples it repudiated and finally cast out. There is a strenuous 
effort constantly made to defend New England against charges 
of social and church tyranny and persecution. There is no 
burden on New England to defend herself at all. These : 
things were never among her principles. They were local to 
Massachusetts Bay. They were not developed in Plymouth 
nor in Connecticut. They were the self-assertion of a foreign 
and extraneous element ; of a parasite that fastened upon the 
state till it was thrown off. It was as hostile, and as incom- 
patible with the genuine spirit of the Pilgrim and Puritan col- 
onization, as the schemes and policy of Frontenac and La Salle 
would have been. No more unique figures loom out of the 
colonial past than those of the gloomy fanatic John Norton 
and the savage inquisitor John Endicott. Their pitiless souls, : 
regaled by the incense of blood and torment, grow more re- 
pulsive as they recede in time. But Endicott and Norton, 
and Dudley and Wilson, do not represent the original spirit 
or the permanent influence of the Puritan colony nor its his- 
torical contribution to the future. They belong to an ahen 
element that came on the ships as a stowaway, and those 
who overthrew this monster of their time are the exponents 
of New England, which was substantially homogeneous after- 
ward, but not before. When we speak of the Puritan we 
should think of him as he stood, less Endicott and less Norton 
and Dudley; speak of him as he stood by the side and with 
the sympathy of Miles Standish, who was no narrow church- 
man, not even a church-member. The annals of Massachu- 
setts would be vastly fewer than they are if there were taken, 
from them all that pertains to the struggle to get rid of that 
unrepublican freight of individual rank, of class distinction, 
of clerical abuse of position and influence, and scheming for 
dominion in political affairs ; just as the annals of the re- 
public would be less if the long struggle to throw out the un- 
republican element of slave tyranny had never arisen to be 
narrated. The long struggle with slavery was an episode, 
an incidental controversy. It was but a clearing of the deck 
that the republic might proceed upon her career to work out 
her contribution to universal history. In like manner all 



26 Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

New England had to wait until Massachusetts had freed her- 
self from her incubus and brought herself back to the original 
starting-point of Plymouth and Connecticut, so that all might 
move on together. 

In Massachusetts the disfranchised majority, which repre- 
sented the opposition, had at its side the steady reinforce- 
ment of the sentiment and opinion, and of the consistent 
example and tranquil prosperity of the Plymouth community. 
Without the example of Plymouth's prosperity the Dor- 
chester Adventurers would never have developed the colony 
of Massachusetts Bay, and without the example of its steady 
and consistent administration of civil affairs the social and 
political character of Massachusetts might have differed 
widely from the actual result. The Pilgrims and Puritans 
withdrew themselves from England to America in advance of 
the storm of the revolution, and the colony of Connecticut 
had its origin in a similar movement of protest and secession 
from the alien principles and narrow dominance of Endicott 
and his party. There can be no doubt of the nature of the 
divergence that caused the complete secession of the three 
corporate towns of Watertown, Newtown, and Dorchester, 
under the leadership of Hooker, and their withdrawal to Con- 
necticut. Perhaps they felt it easier to take to the wilderness 
again than to remain in the midst of an unanticipated and un- 
wholesome contention for the rectification of Massachusetts. 
But the movement under Hooker was upon the same plane 
as that of the Mayflower. In both, men bent their thought 
to the elementary principles of society. They studied the 
application of these to practical administration. They framed 
a scheme of social order, to be upheld by the normal action 
of every individual, each in his place, from the bottom of 
the state to the top. The men most reverent to God, and 
the most scriptural-minded, discovered that the antique po- 
litical principle of the pagan states of Greece and Rome — 
the sovereignty within the state, the Delphian rhetra to 
Lycurgus : " Let the power rest with the people," the lib- 
erty of the individual citizen — were less atheistic and more 
elevating than the theocratic principle that put the symbol of 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 27 

ecclesiastical supremacy above the arms of the king in the 
forests of the Hurons and the Ottavvas. But the manner in 
which these men, without any close example, made it the 
vital principle of all organized society, and ordered upon it 
their town, their church, and their state, and passed it on to 
ripen into the formula of " government of the people, by the 
people and for the people," is one of those wonderful things 
that, occurring in history, seem the result of some extra- 
human inspiration. They found out such modes of giving it 
effect as have shown that the individual freedom of small 
democracies, and the patriotism of small independent com- 
munities can be securely expanded upon the broadest planes 
of national and federal life. 

During all the time of the Augean cleansing in Massa- 
chusetts the principles of the Plymouth colony were repre- 
sented and maintained by Connecticut. All the distinctive 
principles of the first constitution of Connecticut were ex- 
pressly or by necessary implication in the constitution of 
the Mayflower. The overshadowing and final absorption of 
Plymouth left them to the leadership and maintenance of 
Connecticut. 

The little municipality known as the New England town 
developed itself almost as a matter of course in Plymouth and 
in Massachusetts. It cannot be necessary to explore the 
obscure tim of the German forests for its original suggestion. 
The municipal citizenship of the Italian cities survived the 
wreck of the empire and the succeeding centuries of intel- 
lectual imprisonment. The idea of corporate political organ- 
ization with election of representatives became thoroughly 
ingrained in the English mind. The conception was im- 
ported from the civil law. When it became necessary in an 
isolated community of slender numbers to frame some mu- 
nicipal society, the form, cast in the mould of the English 
mind, would be sure to take on some such outline. These 
towns are found wherever New England emigration has gone. 
When one sees how the local citizenship of Italian cities sur- 
vived into the renaissance of thought and civic life, he may 
well believe that these minute political organizations on their 



28 Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

basis of popular sovereignty, these social and political mole- 
cules will be henceforth absolutely indestructible. If so, then, 
as a security for the free conditions under which men may 
best develop, they are a priceless contribution to the chain of 
universal history. 

Wherever subsequent migration carried the people of 
Connecticut, there went this form of the New England town. 
In Connecticut the towns created the state and became the 
source from which the state derived its powers.^ This was 
also true in Vermont, which was the immediate offspring of 
Connecticut, as Connecticut was of Massachusetts, and at a 
later period has surpassed Connecticut in the reinforcement 
of these primal principles. The towns organized the govern- 
ment of Vermont,^ which separately declared its own indepen- 
dence of Great Britain, and erected itself into a free and in- 
dependent state, and so maintained itself for nearly fifteen 
years, at first under the name of New Connecticut. This 
constitution of the state by the towns furnished the type and 
the principle of organization of the Federal Union. Wher- 
ever this polity was extended, there went hand in hand with 
it the cause of secular education. Taken for all in all, the 
movement of New England colonization was one of such in- 
tellectual and moral dignity as makes all the other colonizing 
movements of antiquity or of our race commonplace and 
mean. Before dwellings or subsistence had been adequately 
provided, first in Massachusetts and afterward in Connecticut, 
public and private benefaction laid the foundations of the two 
great universities of New England ; and immediately upon 
that basis was founded the common school, and it is nobly 
said that neither poverty nor social caste has ever in New 
England barred the road to education or to public honor, nor 
has ignorance ever been an excuse for personal degradation 
or for crime.' 

The object of the New England colonists was not to ex- 
tend dominion for England, but to establish their own state. 
The Puritans had been sixty years on the coast when the 

' Johnston, Connecticut, p. 62. ' Vermont State Papers, pp. 65-73, 79- 

^ Palfrey, History of New England. 



Front enac atid Miles Standish in the Northwest. 29 

portentous comet of 1680, so ominous to Increase Mather at 
Boston, was watched by La Salle on the Illinois River on his 
return from the Mississippi. The vigilance and enterprise of 
the French had passed up the Lakes and down to the Gulf, 
and had prepared to check the English colonists at the gate 
of the Mohawk and at the head of the Ohio, while they were 
still confined to their settlements along the coast and had not 
crossed the Apallachian chain. They devoted themselves 
not to expansion but to establishment, and the confirmation 
of their security. But there was a vigor in the action by 
which threatening Indian tribes were suppressed that augured 
power in the future. It was a profound and lasting quiet 
that followed the overthrow of the Pequots. Near Fort 
Miami La Salle found some warriors of King Philip who had 
fled from the Puritan vengeance, and who joined his party. 
It must have been a stunning blow that sent those savages 
whirling through the wilderness, till they brought up dazed 
and tamed near the shores of Lake Michigan. It seems un- 
exampled, except by the flight of that fragment of people 
found on the coast of Africa, near the columns of Hercules, 
who claimed to be Canaanites, expelled by the assaults of 
Joshua, the son of Nun. 

Unqualified laudation bears always with itself the evi- 
dence of ill-digested facts and of premature judgment; and 
perhaps an unwarranted glamour has been thrown over the 
subject of schools and of secular learning in the colonial days. 
But the conception of it as a vital part of the civic policy, as 
a feature of the civil state, was never clouded for an instant. 
Always it remains true, that wherever the genuine influence 
of New England has gone there you find the widest tolerance 
of opinion, and that the monsters of superstition are one 
after another slain by the steady and free development of 
education. The intellectual fibres of all the world, two cen- 
turies and a half ago, were puckered and strained by the 
astringent properties of theological speculation, and an in- 
heritance of theological dogma. To expect to find a man 
of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries standing upon 
the higher intellectual plane of some more emancipated men 



30 Frontenac mid Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

of the nineteenth, and surveying their wider horizon, is a 
delusion, and to some extent involves a snare. The extent 
to which the system of teaching, of conferring actual in- 
formation and accurate knowledge of particular subjects, 
was carried by the common schools among the farming 
people and the ordinary classes, and also the real extent of 
what was called " learning" among physicians and clergymen 
and the college men, is usually greatly exaggerated, and from 
a modern point of view it cannot seem very great. It was 
narrow. It was limited by the resources and habits of 
thought that belonged to the times. Grammar, mathematics, 
and geography were not carried very far. There was more 
of literature, though books were few, and of theology there 
was more than enough. There was no skill of engineering to 
build bridges, and but little of the natural sciences — chemis- 
try, anatomy, physiology — and these conditions fettered the 
study of clergymen and of physicians. But the study of the 
civil and common law, of history and of the regulations of 
society and government were opened to the highest develop- 
ment of thought, and the intellect of men was trained on 
these in public affairs as well as on the abstruse questions of 
metaphysics and theology. With voting went debating in 
that school of statecraft the town-meeting, and discussion 
of all the civil polity of the state. But limited and narrow as 
the learning taught in the schools of New England may now 
be thought to have been, the contrast between the relative 
estimates in New England and elsewhere of its importance, 
and between its abundance and the destitution of the rest of 
the country, represented an immeasurable abyss. It is this 
difference by contrast, not the absolute extent of learning irt 
New England, which made her people and her policy so con- 
spicuous in this regard. Compared, however, with the other 
colonies the extent of it was prodigious, and, what is more 
important, it was universally diffused. Public sentiment 
everywhere demanded its diffusion as the first condition of 
society, and to the utmost extent that the slender resources 
of the times and the country would allow. It quickened and 
enlightened mental activity everywhere. It gave intelligence 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 3 1 

to guide and direct the force of individuals and communities. 
It furnished the elements of reason and judgment to opinions. 
That it should be adequate to overcome all narrowness and 
bigotry was not to be expected. That it should cut men 
abruptly away from their intellectual inheritance of thought, 
or lift them out of their inevitable environment, was of course 
impossible. But many things are charged to narrowness and 
to bigotry, which had their foundation in the most compre- 
hensive ideas of social and political emancipation. It may be 
convenient enough for the adherents of various forms of ec- 
clesiastical organization to attribute the resistance of New 
England to Episcopacy and Presbyterianism, as times then 
were, to bigotry, but it is false. It was liberality and liberty, 
not bigotry or narrowness. It was the protest against being 
narrowed. The Church of England and the Scotch Presby- 
tery represented to them the very abomination of ecclesiasti- 
cism, from which they had recoiled and fled. They wanted 
no ecclesiastical organization to confuse loyalty to the organi- 
zation with fidelity to religion, or to superintend their thought 
upon any subject or dominate their modes of public educa- 
tion. They were unable to point to any time or country in 
which the great mass of the population were improved in 
their intellectual and political condition by the control or in- 
fluence of any ecclesiastical system whatever. 

At all times a somewhat equivocal policy disguised the 
real determination of all the colonists in the matter of abso- 
lute independence both of the king and the ecclesiastical 
power of England. In their own hearts the settlers carried a 
habitual sentiment of independence, which was at variance 
sometimes with their immediate policy and with the for- 
mal declarations of their public documents. A tendency to 
assume an independent sovereignty was always active in New 
England from the hour the Mayflower compact was signed. 
It asserted itself strongly in the league of the four colonies, 
and was continually visible in the conduct of public affairs. 
A war of independence was inevitable from the first political 
act of the Pilgrims. It was sure to come. John Adams said : 
"The authority of Parliament was never generally acknowl- 



32 Fro7ite7iac a?id Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

edged in America." Burdette wrote to Laud in 1637, " The 
colonists aim not at new discipline, but at sovereignty." An 
intelligent people, bred to a degree of liberty elsewhere un- 
known, trained by peril and hardship to self-reliance and the 
use of arms, were little likely ever to be tamed again to 
subjection to a distasteful and distant power. To guard 
against this tendency, which would be strengthened by the 
growth of the colonies into the Northwest regions, still more 
remote, England proposed to close that vast domain against 
population, and impeded and prohibited the settlement of 
the Northwest. At one time it was considered, with the 
same end in view, whether Canada should not be restored to 
the French dominion ; and finally, by the Quebec Act in 
1774, on the basis chiefly of the French settlement and occu- 
pation in Illinois, it was intended to permanently detach the 
Northwest from the Shore Colonies and link it with Canada, 
so that its permanent affiliations should be with the St. Law- 
rence basin and not with the Atlantic slope. Only the Rev- 
olution broke this purpose. The Northwest was conquered 
from England and the savages, as it had been from France and 
the savages. Such was the stake of the Northwest in the 
Revolution. Nevertheless there was little association and 
less affiliation between New England and the other English 
colonies before the events leading to the Revolution brought 
them into combination. " Till the time of the Boston Port 
Bill," says Palfrey, "Massachusetts and Virginia, the two 
principal English colonies, had with each other scarcely more 
relations of acquaintance, business, mutual influence, or com- 
mon action, than either of them had with Jamaica or Que- 
bec." But from the moment their action in concert began, 
the principles of the Plymouth constitution were asserted and 
became dominant. The Northwest territory grew out of a 
request of Congress that States would cede their western lands 
to the government to aid a fund for the payment of the public 
debt ; and in 1787 Congress passed an ordinance for the gov- 
ernment of the inhabitants of that territory. By the influence 
of New England, through this unexampled secondary consti- 
tution, the territory of the Northwest steadily unified itself 



FroHfekac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 33 

and became as distinct a historical unit within the republic 
as New England was among the colonies. The first provision 
of the Ordinance of 1787 established entire religious freedom ; 
its second, those "just and equal" principles which are usu- 
ally inserted in bills of rights ; the third provided for the 
management and support of schools ; and the sixth, that there 
should be no slavery — nothing but freedom — within the 
boundaries of the vast territory which is now Ohio, Indiana, 
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois. This was made by New 
England men a condition upon which alone they stood ready 
to purchase five million acres of this public domain.' No ar- 
gument or exposition can make more obvious the Mayflower 
character of the Ordinance of 1787, and it is no empty figure 
of rhetoric to say that when it went into force Frontenac was 
supplanted, and Miles Standish, the captain of the Pilgrims, 
had set his feet in victory upon the territory of the North- 
west. 

By one other Important avenue the New England com- 
monwealths have entered upon the Northwest. These col- 
onists were Englishmen. The entire period of their emigra- 
tion, commencing in 1620, hardly extended forty years. A 
singular sense of satisfaction in their ethnic identity, and a 
corresponding sharp dislike of foreigners was always aggres- 
sively active. By laws and social sentiment and the coldest 
inhospitality they discouraged their coming even as servants. 
They hated Irish and Frenchmen and prelacy under every 
form uncompromisingly, and were well content that Dutch- 
men should keep as far away as they would. Naturalization 
was made difficult and inconvenient. Their great pride of 
race grew with inherited enmity and suspicion under the in- 
fluence of their controversies. While the glories of England 
were theirs also, the dislike of foreigners came to include her 
nevertheless, as soon as the spirit of liberty and the purpose 
of independence defined itself clearly in an issue of arms. 
At the close of the Revolution and at the opening of this 
century, and long afterward, the people of New England re- 
mained, perhaps, the purest part of the English race, multi- 

^ William F. Poole, North Am. Rev,, April, 1876, Ordinance of 1787. 



34 Frontejtac a7id Miles Standisk in the Northivest. 

plying in the close seclusion of their own borders, and having 
little communication with the outside world. This character- 
istic of the New England people, made conspicuous among 
the other colonies, was a principal cause there of a bitterness 
of sentiment and political angularity toward them that fre- 
quently found more or less definite expression.^ The move- 
ments of this people were confined, until a very modern 
period, entirely within their own borders ; but of one part of 
this territory there is a peculiar record. The native Algon- 
quin population, never dense, was disposed along the sea- 
coast, with an occasional interior tribe not far from the sea. 
Beyond the Hudson lay the permanent abode of the Mo- 
hawks and their allied tribes, but Western Massachusetts and 
Vermont, with Northern New Hampshire, appear to have 
been void of any human occupation. Moreover, no indica- 
tions suggest the presence there, as in some other regions, 
of any more ancient people. No mounds, no ancient groves, 
no fragments of antique pottery or primitive weapons speak 
of primitive races. " It is a long way," it is said, " from a 
cromlech to Westminster Abbey," but there are no more 
traces of cromlechs than of cathedrals. A few arrow-heads, 
and relics that signify the occasional passing of savages, out 
for hunting or for war, are the only things that check the 
bound of the imagination to the belief that in all this vast 
' Lodge, Eng. Col., 407, 474. Palfrey, Hist, of New Eng., Preface. 
" The next wish of this traveller will be to know whence came all these peo- 
ple ? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, 
and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed that race now called Americans has 
arisen. 71ie eastern provinces must indeed be excepted as being the unmixed de- 
scendants of Englishmen. I have heard many wish they had been more inter- 
mixed also ; for my part, I am no wisher, and / think it much better as it has hap- 
pened. They exhibit a most conspicuous figure in this great and variegated 
picture ; they, too, enter for a great share in the pleasing perspective displayed in 
these thirteen provinces. I know it is fashionable to reflect on them, but I respect 
them for what they have done ; for the accuracy and wisdom with which they 
have settled their territory ; for the decency of their manners ; for their early love 
of letters ; their ancient college, the first in this hemisphere ; for their industry ; 
which to me who am but a farmer, is the criterion of everything."— Crevecceur, 
The American Farmer, p. 48. 

See also Travels through the United States, by the Duke de la Rochefoucault- 
Liancourt, ii., p. 214. London ed., 1799. 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 3 5 

region of forest and streams no human being ever had abode 
from the beginning of time till it was occupied by the people 
of Connecticut. But for nearly a century and a half a shadow 
of unutterable horror held back the multitude of brave and 
enterprising colonists who gathered at the very border of the 
fated domain. Year after year the forest fruits fell unheeded 
and the foliage decked the earth in colors of gold and red 
that matched the imperial splendor of cathedral transepts. 
Through successive seasons the streams bounded in the sun 
and froze into the* silence of death, and the fertile lands that 
might have blossomed with harvests lay dull and hopeless 
under the stars and the sun; for over them brooded the 
terror that was the ally of the old lion, Frontenac, and of his 
successors who held sway at Quebec. In all the wars of 
France and England the American colonies had a frightful 
participation. The Indian allies of the Canadian French 
were hurled not only upon the Iroquois tribes that lay within 
the gateway of the continent formed by the Mohawk valley, 
but upon the settlements of New England. The atroci- 
ties of Deerfield and Haverhill overawed the disposition 
to settle in undefended places ; and to invade the region 
where these murderous bands were prowling was to enter 
into the shadow of inevitable destruction. The customary 
route of Indian foray through the wilderness was to follow the 
frozen water-courses, with such portages as were necessary 
to pass from one to another. The Canadian savages came 
by Lake Champlain to streams entering it from the East, 
and thence crossed over to the Connecticut ; or from Lake 
George by the portage to the Hudson, and thence up the 
Hoosac to its head-waters, and over the mountains to the 
Deerfield River. The old Indian trail runs there almost ex- 
actly over the great railway tunnel. By whichever route, 
the war parties came at last upon the settlements through the 
narrow gateways of Southern Vermont, and at any hour their 
plumed and painted shapes might emerge from the forest. 
Such a terror brooded over this region till the final conquest 
of Canada in 1760; but in the meanwhile the Taghconic val- 
ley of Western Vermont and of Western Massachusetts was 



36 Fronteiiac and Miles Standisli in the Northwest. 

like the valley of Esdraelon, the passage-way of armies. The 
colonial soldiers that engaged in the French and Indian 
wars about Lake Champlain and Lake George passed forth 
and back through this valley, the home afterward of Ethan 
Allen and of Warner, and came to know the most fruitful 
part of New England ; and one of them left the memorial of 
his passage in the original foundation of Williams College. 
As soon as it ceased to be swept by war parties of Canadian 
savages the people of Connecticut filled it with their populous 
and prosperous settlements.' I have sketched and dwelt upon 
this peculiar, and not too familiar, course of New England 
settlement because of the enormous proportional part borne 
by the people of this region, in the present century, in the 
emigration from New England to the territory of the North- 
west. Like their predecessors of Plymouth and Connecticut, 
individual freedom was their civil corner-stone ; the church 
with them hardly preceded the school ; and none but a free- 
man ever breathed in the air of Vermont.^ 

There was almost no emigration from New England prior to 
the close of the Revolutionary War, nor was it considerable 
till the beginning of the present century. But in 1840 about 
half a million people born there were living in other States. 
Forty years later nothing was more conspicuous than the 
impress of New England upon the States of the old North- 
west through the presence of her people. In proportion to 
population, by far the largest number is from Vermont, and 
the least from New Hampshire. Of the native New England 
population in the Northwest, in 1880, three-fourths were from 
the three States of Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut ; 
Vermont contributing about three-fourths as many as Massa- 
chusetts, and Connecticut less than two-thirds as many as 
Vermont. The part this emigration has borne in the political 
and social development of the Northwest, in which the rem- 
nants of French occupation are disappearing, is too famiUar to 
be made the subject of present discussion. 

' Thompson, History of Vermont, Part 2, p. l6 ; Hall, Early History of Ver- 
mont, p. 4. 

• Legislative Act of October 30, 1786. Selectmen of Windsor vs. Jacob, 2 Tyler 
Rep., 194-199. 29 N. E. Reg., 247. Jennings, Memorials of a Century, p. 336. 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 37 

And now, if, as Socrates said to Protagoras, we had the 
result standing in human shape before us, would it condemn 
and deride us, or could the Puritan scholars silence that by- 
demonstration that some permanent good has been confirmed 
by them to human society ? If this shape should interrogate 
them, they could say that under their principles of unfettered 
thought and education there have been developed the most 
elevating and hopeful conditions for the general good under 
which man ever lived ; and that it is proven that any eccle- 
siastical or political institution that cannot face the freest 
thought and widest education is certainly charged with mis- 
chief for society. But the most sinister and shocking thing 
in the world is that horrid sneer which the satirists have 
passed down the generations of man, at the infirmity that has 
sacrificed to the silliest vanities and most selfish ambitions 
every guarantee for the survival or growth of any good. It is 
well for us to consider in what subtle ways great changes come 
about. It is a fact that when the common school was founded 
notwithstanding the clerical tyranny of the separate ministers 
there was no ecclesiasticism in New England. There was re- 
ligion, absorbing and profound, and the spirit of worship and 
the abuse of the influence of the individual minister. But 
there was no ecclesiasticism. There was no organization 
framed not merely to administer religion, but also to formu- 
late creeds and to regulate thought by discipline and its own 
rules. For more than fifty years the celebration of marriage 
was permitted to none but the civil magistrates. The sects 
whose tendencies were to concentration of authority and to 
discipline never rooted well, but found a cold and reluctant 
soil in New England. A system of independent churches 
conserved among the people the purity of religious faith and 
simplicity of service, and equally defended the independence 
of the mind. There was no organization to confuse itself and 
its regulations with the religion it represented, and inculcate 
an absorbing obligation of loyalty to the organization sim- 
ply.' If there had been, the principles of New England edu- 
cation would have been different from what they were. This 

' Palfrey, History of New England, pp. 298-408. 



38 Front enac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 

shows under what sunlight our educational principles and the 
Ordinance of 1787 were born, and under what conditions they 
may be stifled. There have such changes come about in forty 
years, by the emigration of the native population and the silent 
substitution of another, that, by the census of 1880, seventy- 
two per cent, of the births in New England were within the 
inclosure of the most intolerant ecclesiasticism of all human 
history. So our primal and basic principles may be insecure. 
The doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, that gov- 
ernmental power is derived from the people, is authoritatively 
declared to be atheistical and unscriptural. The old question 
of supremacy is still alive, therefore, and doctrines concerning 
the right and expediency of property, which were discussed 
by Aristotle and Plato, are filling all industrial communities 
with controversies between labor and capital, and revolts 
against accumulation of property. It may be that great mod- 
ifications are yet to be made in the constitution of society, 
and that education and liberty will have a long work to per- 
form in dissipating or relieving the burdens of society at this 
point on the world's surface, at which men and races are con- 
vening from all the regions of the earth. 

An obscurity equally comprehensive and profound vexes 
all conceptions of the future of the commonwealth. But it is 
an ancient teaching that " immortal night is called the nurse 
of the gods," and out of the perplexities of thought well- 
founded ideas are slowly evolved. We may believe that the 
little towns, with their citizenship and rights of election and 
representation, capable of assimilating every new and service- 
able element that may be developed, will be indestructible 
germs of that form of political life ; that they will survive the 
wreck of successive national experiments in organizing society 
and changing its forms, and prove a permanent contribution 
to Universal History. The products of a historical unit, those 
concrete results which are to be carried forward in making up 
the course of universal history, are impersonal to the last de- 
gree. If there may be a Philosophy of History, its indica- 
tions are to be looked for in them. While in the advanced 
condition of the future commonwealth, ideas far differing 



Frontenac and Miles Standish in the Northwest. 39 

from ours upon religion and morals and politics and social ad- 
justment will apparently prevail, we may expect, if the race 
advances, the steady confirmation of the great Pilgrim and 
Puritan principles, which rest society and government upon 
the development of the individual citizen, because the dis- 
placement of Frontenac was a surmounting of the fleur-de-lys 
and the banners of France not merely by the standards of the 
republic, but by the kingliness of intellectual man. 



u .. 



